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Ping Identity gets $44M to make SaaS usage simple and secure

Lots of businesses have been sold on the idea of paying a little bit each month for Software as a Service (SaaS) that doesn’t need to be hosted behind the corporate firewall. But managing all those logins and user access on many devices can be tedious, which is why it makes sense to have a single sign-on system in place.

Ping Identity provides that service, and investors are giving the company $44 million in new funding. DFJ Growth and W Capital Partners led the round, announced Tuesday, along with contributions from previous investors Appian Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Catalyst Partners, Triangle Peak Partners, SAP Ventures and Volition Capital. Debt from Silicon Valley Bank is also part of the mix.

Over at AllThingsD, Arik Hesseldahl is reporting the company has raised a total of $78 million to date and is looking to go public next year. However, a company spokeswoman wrote in an email that the company has now raised $90 million in total.

The new funding will help the company expand internationally, handle rapid growth on the infrastructure side and “extend its identity security use cases for workforce, customers and partners,” among other things, the spokeswoman wrote.

The Denver-based company has been at it in the single sign-on realm since 2002, claiming more than 900 customers, including Boeing, (s ba) Chevron (s cvx) and Comcast. (s cmcsa) Meanwhile, more and more SaaS vendors are offering to support single sign-on from Ping and its competitors. Back in April, for example, Dropbox pitched it as a move to become more IT friendly.

The PingOne single sign-on service lets IT administrators quickly and easily grant or take away access to users for all available services from a central point. That means simplicity goes both ways — for admins and end users.

It does seem clear that more companies will look to new tools to manage sign-on for SaaS services in the future, as the number of applications companies goes up higher and higher. And the extra funding can help fend off competitors such as Centrify, IronStratus, Okta and OneLogin.

This story was updated at 10:58 a.m. PT with additional detail on the company’s funding. It was updated again Wednesday to remove a reference to Netflix (s nflx) as a current Ping Identity customer. Netflix was listed as a customer on the company’s website on Tuesday, but a company spokeswoman confirmed that the reference should not have been there and is in the process of being taken down.